EA Sports has brought a whole new level of ephemera to the FIFA 15 marketing campaign with its ‘Incredible Visuals’ trailer. First of all, these visuals are not incredible. They’re fine. Pretty good, even. But not incredible. Having a player’s shorts get dirty and their hair wave around a bit is not ‘incredible.’ Focusing on the small touches that make the game look more perfect, such as the respiratory system in every game so the players will be able to see the movement of the chest cavity like a person who was breathing when playing the ball, other than that there is an animated LED board which beautify the appearance of the playing field.

And it has to be said, on PS4 and XBOX ONE, Fifa 15 is beautiful to look at. A new lighting engine, designed around the Battlefield 4 system, uses global illumination to light each stadium from a single “sun” source. On fine evenings, an authentic golden hue descends over the pitch, while rainy nights get the shroud of mist and blurred floodlights.

Regular players will fire up the game and instantly note that the menus have barely changed. Play for long enough and you'll hear repeated lines from FIFA 14 coming out of the mouths of Alan Smith and Martin Tyler. And even the mini-games are mostly the same as last time out. To summarise the surface new stuff: players and the pitch look exceptional, the Turkish league is now in, Emotional Intelligence feels purely cosmetic and has barely any bearing on proceedings. Oh, and you can now see shirts being pulled. Got it? Good. Instead, EA has used its time to improve the thing that matters most: gameplay.



The only real change concerns the execution of set pieces, during which you can now use the right analog stick to control directly the recipient of the passage or exploit his movement to free a comrade and send him to the door with a scheme well made, maybe selecting between one of many that we can study and perfect in training. Finally, the AI players and goalkeepers has been rescheduled to be influenced by the battle and, in the case of extreme defenders, less infallible. Players react instinctively opposed to the body in case of close-ups and conclusions happen very often to see goalkeepers deflect a ball using any part of the body, just like in real life. Bigger changes in terms of playability and end there, without representing a revolution, go to the system further perfection of classic game of the series.

How this will work exactly is not clear as of yet, but it will probably take some getting used to when you first pick up the controller to play the game. However, when you get used to the new format it will hopefully be a much better experience for all players, provided the learning curve and rewards and correctly balanced. In truth, FIFA 15 grants far too many concessions to the voracious attacker instead of honing a system that rewards both ends of the footballing spectrum. And that’s neglecting to mention the changes made to goalkeepers, who now range from calamity-stricken to impenetrable with professedly nothing in-between.